Sitting in the sparse bedroom where Bawa spent his last three years — and his last day — in a coma, 23-year-old Bhavna fought back tears. “I kept hoping he would come back. He would open his eyes, but he never registered our presence.” Two days ago, she accepted the Bhavesh Sanyal Award on her father’s behalf. It was a fitting tribute; Sanyal had been Bawa’s teacher.

Ina Puri, Bawa’s partner, biographer and curator of his last show at the Sakshi Art Gallery in 2006, said, “Manjit was full of life. He loved to sing and paint, and was a romantic at heart. Seeing him lie there, unable to do anything for three years, was not easy for any of us.”

As a young boy, Bawa was more interested in cockfights than in school. One day, his brother Manmohan, a commercial artist, made the boy pose for him. “Manjit, mesmerised by the magic of pencil and charcoal, tried his own hand at art,” writes Puri in her biography, In Black and White. He could never stop after that, and despite being discouraged by his mother, enrolled at the School of Art in Delhi in 1958. The family wasn’t affluent and art did not fetch six-figures sums then, but as Bawa wrote later, “I believed God would provide me with food and I would earn the rest.”

Having studied silkscreen painting in Britain in 1971, Bawa was aware that he ran the risk of becoming just another “derivative European-style painter”. So he developed his own style, combining training as a Modern artist with his love for age-old myths and deities. His art was gentle: so much so that even when it charted violence in Mapping the Conscience, a 2004 exhibition on the anti-Sikh violence, the images never turned brutal or bloody.

He enhanced his themes with a unique figuration that elongated and twisted forms as if they had no bones, no human restrictions. “The contortions were never disturbing. In fact, they went along beautifully with what he wanted to say,” said artist Krishen Khanna about his “junior” who never forgot to touch his feet whenever they met.

“At first, Manjit’s paintings did not sell,” recalled Bawa’s elder brother and mentor Manmohan. “Our relatives thought he was just wasting his time, until a Lalit Kala Akademi Award in 1981 became the turning point.” Bawa’s lyrical figures reinvented Krishna and Akka Mahadevi, and his works drew good prices even before the art boom had set in. “He was a painter who had a very sensitive and distinct attitude. He was not afraid to use old religious themes. His use of flat colour backgrounds and his treatment of animals had never been done before,” said Jogen Chowdhury, another close friend who knew Bawa since 1973.

“When he returned from London, I was working at Rashtrapati Bhavan and we worked for a group called Gallery 26 at Delhi’s Gole Market. We frequently spent time at my place, and he was a great cook,” Chowdhury said. “We have lost one of our most important painters.”

Bawa had a grand plan to paint the black Garden of Desire, but the coma stilled it. Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, NGMA Director Rajeev Lochan and artists Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Anita Dube, Vivan Sundaram and Shobha Broota paid their last respects to Bawa. The Lalit Kala Akademi will hold a special service to honour his memory. The family will decide on the works that lie in his studio.